As creative as some BMW racers might get with their cars, the heavy-duty LeMons racers prefer marques not as well known for their racing heritage. In fact, they prefer marques that haven’t even existed for 25 years. Like, say, American Motors! We’ve seen a respectable assortment of AMC products competing in the 24 Hours of LeMons so far, enough that we’ve seen how incredibly good—and, sometimes, stupendously bad—this idea turns out to be in practice.

A year or so passed before we saw our next Kenosha product on a LeMons racetrack. This AMC-built Renault Alliance (a 1983 10Best winner, for which we profusely apologized a few years back) showed up at the 2009 Arse Freeze-a-Palooza with an impressive collection of cheaty parts installed. We hammered the car with penalty laps, which proved unnecessary as the Franco-Wisconsonian machine broke down early and often.

Speaking of Renault-based cars built by AMC during the era of its desperate decline and fall, this Eagle Premier performed shockingly well at The Lamest Day, held at a very muddy Nelson Ledges in 2009. PRV engine and all, it managed to run for much of the weekend, putting down some pretty good lap times for such a big car.

After that, Substandard Racing put together this four-wheel-drum-brake-equipped 1973 AMC Gremlin in Texas. The first time out, at the 2010 Gator-O-Rama race, the Gremlin turned out to have quite a few mechanical issues and didn’t live up to its full potential.

The LeMons Supreme Court decided, around this time, that LeMons racers needed to demonstrate proper AMC knowledge. Thus was born the “Identify the AMC Snout” penalty. Using illustrations scanned from an AMC shop manual, the flashcards feature everything from a 1970 AMX to a 1975 Ambassador coupe.

Here we see me showing one of the Identify the AMC Snout cards to a miscreant racer in the Penalty Box. Get three year/model identifications correct, go back to racing!

Here’s an AMC so old that it was initially marketed as a Rambler: the Marlin. Speed Holes Racing stuffed a Chevrolet 454 truck engine into this Swiss-cheesed ’66 (set back about three feet from the original engine location), then installed a Jaguar XJ-6 rear suspension out back. It looked great and ran pretty well at the first annual B.F.E. GP in Colorado, winning the coveted Organizer’s Choice trophy, but Speed Holes wasn’t done upgrading the car.

For the 2011 B.F.E. GP, Speed Holes installed a pair of Eaton superchargers (yanked from junkyard Bonneville SSEis) and a complicated draw-through throttle-body fuel/air delivery system. Twin blowers on a 454 sounded great—right up until the moment an engine backfire obliterated the entire setup.

We still hadn’t seen a LeMons Pacer after nearly six LeMons seasons, but LeMons Legend Speedycop solved that problem for us at the 2012 Southern Discomfort race by bringing this 1978 example. Speedycop was stretched even thinner than usual by his vast fleet of cars at that race, so the Pacer wasn’t quite as well prepared as it might have been. Still, the Speedycop and the Gang of Outlaws AMC finished 59th out of 82 entries.

Knowing he didn’t have time to knock the Pacer into real racing condition and build 27 other LeMons cars at the same time, Speedycop sold the Pacer to a wild-eyed crew of Colorado racers and shipped out the car from Maryland to the Rockies. At the 2012 B.F.E. GP, the Blue Flag Special Pacer ran all weekend long (on wheels and tires that once lived on my ’66 Dodge A100 van) and grabbed the top prize of the race: Index of Effluency!

We’ve seen a few Jeep Cherokees competing in LeMons, but only the Petty Cash Racing ’87 Cherokee was built before Chrysler gobbled up the tattered remnants of AMC and Jeep. This two-wheel-drive, solid-front-axle truck has done quite well in several years of racing, despite it single-handedly killing a large percentage of the nation’s inventory of AMC six-cylinder engines.

What’s next for AMC glory in the 24 Hours of LeMons? We’re still waiting for our first Matador, not to mention a Javelin or even a Rambler Classic. So, when you’re shopping for your next race car, forget about the boring E30 BMW 3-series and Mazda RX-7s and set your sights on some Kenosha steel!Image source: Old Car Brochures